Prestige of scholarly book publishers: an investigation into criteria, processes, and practices across countries

TL;DR

This study examines how the prestige of scholarly book publishers is assessed across different countries, revealing inconsistencies and transparency issues that question the reliability of current evaluation methods.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of the criteria, processes, and practices used in assessing publisher prestige across multiple countries, highlighting the need for more comprehensive evaluation approaches.

Findings

Inconsistencies in publisher rankings across countries and years

Lack of transparency in assessment processes

Current rankings focus mainly on gatekeeping roles

Abstract

Numerous national research assessment policies set the goal of promoting "excellence" and incentivise scholars to publish their research in the most prestigious journals or with the most prestigious book publishers. We investigate the practicalities of the assessment of book outputs based on the prestige of book publishers (Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Lithuania, Norway). Additionally, we test whether such judgments are transparent and yield consistent results. We show inconsistencies in the levelling of publishers, such as the same publisher being ranked as prestigious and not-so-prestigious in different states or in consequent years within the same country. Likewise, we find that verification of compliance with the mandatory prerequisites is not always possible because of the lack of transparency. Our findings support doubts about whether the assessment of books based on a judgement about their publisher yields acceptable outcomes. Currently used rankings of publishers focus on evaluating the gatekeeping role of publishers but do not assess other essential stages in scholarly book publishing. Our suggestion for future research is to develop approaches to evaluate books by accounting for the value added to every book at every publishing stage, which is vital for the quality of book outputs from research assessment and scholarly communication perspectives.